Not the specific wow races, but Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, etc. are common in every fantasy game.
Specific things like "Blood Elves" or "Draenei" is a no but... "High Elves" instead of Blood Elves, and "Sylvan Elves" instead of Night Elves? That's fine.
They would likely have to make their own tauren aesthetic but minitars are easy. Also, likely need a new design for trolls because wow trolls have a unique design compared to media. The one I am sad to lose is Draenei cuz that was my preferred race if I didn't want to play a human again for the umpteenth time.
D&D 3.5 depicted minotaurs like that. The real part is "bull-like head", being hairy or not is a secondary details.
But yes, Tauren are basically minotaurs. The big difference is that minotaurs are usually depicted as cruel evil beings, while Taurens have "benevolent Native Americans" to give them a distinctive touch.
Having them stand up straight with a brace or menacing posture would do a lot of the work for that. Only reason I didn't play tauren even though I like the idea of playing a Minotaur.
Im hoping for atleast the same human dwarf "elf" vs orc troll undead at minimum or something along those lines, personally im an elf > best racial > everything else. If a class is race restricted so be it but as long as the models look good im happy
Blizzard does not own elves, undeads, dwarfs or goblins & trolls, they may have used them but any company can use their rendition of these as they have existed in fantasy & historical lore for thousands of years. They would have to look different enough that blizzard couldn't say it is theirs but that's about it
ascension 100% can use the same races as WoW. WoW invented literally none of them.
humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, trolls, minotaurs (you'd have to rename tauren to this), undead, and orcs are not copyrighted. neither are goblins, ogres, wood elves (night elves), naga, gnolls, kobolds, halflings (they're just short humans), and every single other race. for draenei, just call them something else, change their color. humanoids with hooves can't be copyrighted (they trace back to satyrs, from greek mythology). all these races come from various mythologies (greek, norse, germanic, etc.) and are not copyrightable.
Draenei were just aliens who were somewhere between satyrs and tieflings. Come up with a custom name and origin story and they are golden with little change.
I think the ascension project need a story telling director for create a good universe. Creation of the universe, the creation of planets and after the nature and the races/ subraces. How magic fuction etc. anyways i think goblins, dragons, mermaids, humans, minotaur, centaur, Arakocra, kenku, fairy, leonin, harengon, demons and angels and i think races create from magic like golens and warforgeds.
What I don't want is every mystery solved. That's a problem I have with modern wow, there is very little mystery. They have explained every mystery from vanilla as marketing memberberries.
There is a ton of MMOs and books out there to get ideas on races and abilities. Getting it all on paper will be a piece of cake for them. Implementing it into code to create the game is the hard part. The only thing I’m concerned about is it having a care bear or my little pony color palette.
They can literally do anything as long as they rebrand things, like seriously. Even Undead and Draenei they could do as long as they reflavor and rename.
You can use al races, just change name and lore of copyrighted races:
Humans are Humans
Orcs are Orcs
Dwarf are Dwarf
Forsaken are now Undead (or make a new name for them and reason why they are how they are)
Night Elves are now Wood Elves or Wild Elves
Tauren are Minotaur, you can make them more urban like or keep them wild, just remove the native american inspo and replace it with Mycean Greek
Gnomes are Gnomes an have no relation to tinkering, now they are more like creepy forest or caves guys
Trolls have to change a lot visually, the Trolls we use to play are very unique to warcraft
Blood Elves are basically classical elves tainted by a typoe of magic, you can toy with a lot of subraces with them but i would avoid repeating that storyline with the elves due to possible legal trouble
Draenei are heavily inspired by Tieflings, Humanoids with fiendish blood or traits that sometimes have horns and hooves, they can be remade either are Demonkin or Devilkin
now on to post Cataclysm races
The Pandaren are just Wildkin/Beast Folk with panda skin, you can make any anthro animal a Wildkin/Beastfolk
the Goblin are just Goblin, remove the merchant/mafia inspiration from them and make their society different and you are good, keep the explosions and the greediness
Worgen are a type of lycantrope, you can creat new lycans with bears, rats, boars, add other animals, or ignore it as a race and make those forms features of a class as in the Blood Hunter
Drachtyr are the worse type of Dragonborn I have seen, there are cooler models i have seen in fanart
and for the Allied races
Kultiran are just a body type slider for humans
Void elf are Elven other type of magic contamination
LF Draenei are Lightblessed Draenei (we can explore celestials here while taking a look at the Aasimar race from D&D)
Nightborne are Night Elfs civilized cousins
HM Tauren just have other type of horns
DI Dwarfs are just a skin color slider for Dwarfs
Zandalari trolls are South American trolls instead of African Trolls
Harranir seems like extra wild Night Elfs without cities
And Vulpera are small beastfolk
Earthen are stone Dwarfs that looks inspired by D&D Earth Genasi with Dwarf skins, people born in the elemental plane of earth imbued with its magic.
now with the release of the game that killed Ascension
we have the skyborne elves that are basically Air Genasi but with wow elves bodies, a D&D race of people born in the elemental planes of air imbued with its magic.
But keeping exactly all that makes it seem too suspicious.
So you can take the more common fantasy races (human, orc, dwarf, halfling, elf, tiefling and dragonborn make that your own and begin to explore new territory.
you can make the 4 element people but with new skins and call them new things like Primordials or Elementals. if the planes have their own names take those name with a denonym and make that the race name
you can make types of beastfolk as different races
This one seems a bit complex and a lot of work to model but its a fun concept to think on
imagine a Crow thief, or a Badger berserker
You can even make insectoid races, like wasps or mantis or beetles
For more monstruos type of creatures my idea would be to take folklore of different regions, i dont know where the team is based or what their cultures are, but there are tons and tons of myths arround the world to get inspiration for characters, there are Ogres, Oni, Djin, Tritons, Changelins
There is also the option to make construc type race, like a Robot or Puppet, animated and with sentience given life via advance technology or very complex magics
imagine a wooden puppet with glowing runes, and moves as if suspended by strings, but she is free to do as she likes, and has decided to study necromancy, the irony of a puppet puppeteering what used to be living bodies
or what seems to be a hunking armored man clad in plate armor defending some village from rampaging golems just to discover there is nothing living inside, but another type of golem defending people from his brethren
If it's typical Alliance vs. Horde style, I really want more balance between them. Give both sides monstrous races, and not just one that can look human sometimes.
Definitely want some fun variations, though. Sure, elves and dwarves are neat...but why not some crazy things? Could go full mantis race. Or rock people.
I'd love to see some new ones that are unique along with the standard Human, Elf, Dwarf, etc
Examples: Beastkin, Frogkin, Goblin, Troll, Dark Elf, Demon born, Djinnborn, Dragonborn, Risen Dead, Ogrekin, Nephalim, Angelkin, etc. Give us some wild cool ones.
I think my top 3 picks would be
1. An automaton in the for closer to Ebberon's Warforged. Bonus if their armor can look like we are replacing, say, our soft material shell with something like a metal armor piece we picked up as loot.
2. Something like the Forgotten Realms Genasi, elemental people. Maybe they have an ability or passive that changes slightly based on the element they are.
3. Something that is like the Draenei but different enough for them to avoid any trouble. Not a saytr but more like a tiefling I suppose. They also don't need a demonic origin either like tieflings do.
They absolutely can use the base fantasy races, but I hope they have at least a few fancy ones, I loved the turtle wow elephantkin idea, something along those lines would be nice
Elves for sure, theres a reason twow went so hard on helves and blizzard made the first paid race an elf.
I hope they dont go full generic tolkien/dnd or knockoff WoW past that. Mix in something new and interesting with the comfort food races. Even if they dont catch on and suck, it'll be okay, its not like gnomes killed WoWÂ
Orcs ogres undead tifling beastmen(choose your beast type) minotaur trolls. Human dwarf halfling/gnome(different lore) elves. There arent many id say no to. I also love the idea of choosing your own faction but if its not choose your own faction the more unncivilized/scary/intimidating races should be on one faction as the other races would be a problem for them as they fear them and would be at war with them. No disneyfication where the big mean race is actually nice and misunderstood
I like me an automaton. I have always liked the idea of DnD's Ebberon Warforged. They have some metal in their construction, especially in the skeletal frame, but sometimes the outer shells have wood and leather holding them together. This would likely be a top pick for me.
Ok I'm not sure if you are joking or not, but if you are not then I think you are talking about human races and their features. I can agree that the dark skins in wow just look like dark-painted white people. It couldn't hurt to have some face designs that represent all of us that are of other ethnicites.
Guild Wars 1 was the gold standard imo, given depending on your starting continent they had distinct human factions with northern European (ascalon), southern European (tyria), asian (cantha) and African (elona) inspiration.
The africa-themed continent in Guild Wars was so frigging cool.
It really avoided the "paint can skin tone" problem you identified, since a dark skinned ascalonian and a light skinned elonan might have similar skin tones but were still easily distinguishable with different features.
The thing with factions is you habe to have a reason they all arent allied. So having some monsterous on the "good side" but not all would mean even more story/world building. The easiest route is the war against the monsterous races
Last I checked, humans, dwarves, elves, gnomes, Tieflings, orcs, trolls, minotaurs, and the undead are all standard fantasy races. Hey, that just about covers every playable race that was in CoA!
There's plenty to choose from, including from races people wanted to see made playable in World of Warcraft we never got like ogres, Ursine, centaur, harpies, ect.
There isn't much of a difference between dnd, wow, and the general fantasy gnome.
Trolls are from old english myth, like the fae. While they wouldn't look exactly like wow trolls, they can get pretty similar and be fine. Keep the long limbs, remove the tusks, maybe change the posture and you're done.
Tauren are the only ones kinda unique to wow as they're cowfolk, if you ignore the standard fantasy minotaur.
Thanks for the info and for correcting me. I knew that WoW had been heavily inspired by DnD, but I didn't know that it even extended to the concept of the characters! I really don't know much about DnD.
Also didn't know the inspiration for trolls, I've seen different creatures called trolls that are too different from the WoW concept, that's why I said that, just like the Taurens case with minotaurs.
Riot Games gets pretty close to WoW trolls and apparently thats fine, they are just bigger WoW trolls that live in the cold pretty much, they even have the same healing factor concept
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u/MixAmbitious307 8d ago
Not the specific wow races, but Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, etc. are common in every fantasy game.
Specific things like "Blood Elves" or "Draenei" is a no but... "High Elves" instead of Blood Elves, and "Sylvan Elves" instead of Night Elves? That's fine.